You may have heard Rob Ford missed Toronto’s gay pride parade. I say that facetiously because I know you heard. The news was widespread like the spray of a half-naked man’s watergun. And penis.

Ford has always been transparent about his dissonance with the loud and proud community, yet many were still surprised by his absence. Indeed, if there was one gay event for him strap on a smile for, maybe it was this one. It would have been classy, and it’s not like he’d have to strap on anything else.

Why did he miss this, his city’s most famous parade? Why did he treat it like a Facebook invite where you hit the ‘maybe’ button knowing damn well you’re not going to attend?

Was it because, with his love for cars, he would be insulted by all the day’s rear-ending?

Was it because you can’t spell “gravy train” without “gay train”?

Was it because when people call him a fat faggot he fears they’re speaking literally?

(That was harsh. Harsh like tax cuts.)

No, no and no. I think our mayor, the city’s best citizen, is on the cutting edge of urban identity. I think, like any great mind ahead of its time, we have dismissed its prophecy as nonsensical belligerence.

I think Rob Ford is Toronto’s first post-gay straight man.

Visionary.

In case you don’t know, let me familiarize you with what it means to be post gay, or a post-modern homosexual. About a month ago, The Grid (formerly Eye Weekly) published a gay Torontonian’s personal essay on a new breed of homosexuality. In an aptly titled “Dawn of a New Gay”, the writer argues that in Toronto his people’s political fight is over. Today’s urban homosexual holds a good job, owns a nice house, dates publicly, and does it all with sexual preference as an afterthought. I am a man who does this, this and this, and I happen to be gay. As long as those activities don’t include having a wife, you’re in the clear.

A timely point is made throughout the article that amid this unprecedented equality in-your-face events like Pride are politically vacant expressions of an antiquated stereotype. Or as I like to think of it, Pride is a muscular, screaming-in-falsetto, cock-twirling ghost of itself. It’s like what Casper the Friendly Ghost would be if he grew up. Hey, we all knew that ghost was destined to goatse.

In the rainbow of these revelations, I realized Ford is conversely a brilliant ghost of Christmas future. After eating all of the future’s Christmas turkeys, he has returned to our land to teach us what straight people must become. Learn from him as he refuses to wave his flag beside over-the-top caterwauling twinks. Learn from him as he instead uses solemn silence to show how progressive he is. Gandhi reincarnate, is that you?

Gandhi contemplates how, in his next life, he'll never go on a hunger strike again.

Ford smartly realizes that if an increasing number of gays no longer want to celebrate their lifestyles, straight people have no business doing it for them. The future is now, and quiescence is homage to generations of successful equality campaigns. Straight people have to accept that, as well as the reality that Ford is actually honouring the heroic work of social activists more than any straight person ever has. Correspondingly, just as Black History Month faces growing dissent because it emphasizes difference between races, Ford knows Pride divides our world in the same way. That’s why you certainly won’t see him celebrating Black History Month either!

Ford will hopefully inspire his city to be just as reticent. We can then unify through inaction and live as if the gay liberation never happened, which is exactly what the liberation fought for. I mean, gays love paradox – that’s why they’re gay, right? Dream of it now: When a man decides to wear a dress and a woman shaves her head, no one will want to know why. Dream of it now: A city just like our prophet mayor’s utopian homeland, Etobicoke.

Don't just privatize your garbage, privatize your life!

All Ford wants is what post-gays want, which is also what our dads want. A place where men and women carry on quietly and be expressive only in the privacy of their own homes. Anything else would be uncomfortable for all of us. Why wouldn’t that be perfect? Our dads are pretty cool dudes.

Positively, Ford will be the champion leading our city full circle. It’s no coincidence that the circle is a classic metaphor for the infinitude of God himself – who Ford and his good friend Stephen are very close to, by the way. This is the transcendent, forward-thinking world our mayor is trying to bring us into. But who’d expect you hippies to notice? What, with your marijuana criminal records and escapist cottages. Maybe if you stayed closer to reality, to Toronto, you’d realize Rob Ford is taking us places we’d have never imagined.